Warehouser

a tile matching stratagey game

(c) 2004 Michael Raley

Background:

Welcome to the working man's world. 

     After many years of fruitless game designs that never paid off, 
you are officially broke. Your dad is threatening to kick you out of
the basement if you don't cough up some rent. Computer work is scarce
for those not willing to involve themselves in the spam trade.

    You sign yourself up as a "temporary associate" of the Nomas employment
agency. Weeks go by before your first call, but now you've got a big break.

    The Acme novelty Company has a warehouse filled to the brim with plastic
spiders, play money, toy badges, those heart candies with the little messages,
and for some unknown reason, umbrellas. Lots and lots of umbrellas. 
The firemarshall is gonna freak when he sees how overstacked the warehouse is.
You've got to get down there and help clean the mess up.

     Fortunately this isn't a back breaking job. The warehouse is equiped with 
a state of the art Multi-Trak 2000™ Warehouse operating system. It's almost like 
playing a video game.

    Like many jobs, you have more than one boss running around telling you what to do.
The onsite team foreman says your top priority is is to clear the aisles fast. 
The warehouse manager says you need to take as many crates of like items out at a time
so they can be put back in order. Unfortunately you can't tell either one where to go, 
so you'll have to use some strategy in trying to accomplish both tasks.

CONTROLS and INDICATORS

Mouse Buttons

  • left mouse button operates the crate picker control to remove two or more matching crates
  • right mouse button operates the compactor function which pushes crates to the right.

    • File menu

  • New - restarts game at current difficulty level
  • Load - loads a previously saved game. The grid size must be the same to load
  • Save - saves the current game parameters and player name in a EDS database file
  • Quit - closes the game window

    • Game menu

  • Change Name - Enter your name in the popup window
  • UNDO - takes last move off the stack. See score and respect modifiers below
  • Magic Shuffle - redistributes crates in the grd. See score and respect modifiers below
  • Get Paycheck - awards final score, restarts game at the next level of play.

    • Tile Options menu

  • Select tileset theme - displays a list of available bitmap tilesets
  • 3 tiles - play the lowest difficulty level with
  • 4 tiles - medium difficulty
  • 5 tiles - Difficult, but can be completed
  • 6 tiles - Very difficult

    • Help menu

  • Documentation - Displays this file
  • About - misc. information about the game

    • Status display

  • Score - raw score value
  • % Percentage removed
  • Respect - relative approval rating of the bosses towards your performance
  • Move Stack - the number of moves made. You can undo back to zero, if you dont run out of respect
  • difficulty level (3,4,5, or 6 tiles)
  • Demo Mode - when checked the game will play itself.

    • STRATEGY

    There are 3 primary goals in Ware houser;
+Pull as many matching crates out at a time as possible.
+Clear the aisles 
+Maintain respect. If you lose all respect you will be asked to leave. 

     Initially you get more respect by playing with more tile bitmaps. 
The game starts with 5 differnt bitmaps per theme, but you can select between 3 and 6.
You lose respect every time you have to undo a step or use what old hands like to call 
the "Magic Shuffle". You also lose a little respect each time you only remove two tiles. 
Removing 3 crates has no effect, but pulling 4 or more crates adds a little respect.

    Your final score is expressed in terms of a paycheck based on a number of factors. 
The in-game score is a raw value expressing points based on the number of like crates
you pull out at a time. If you clear an entire aisle (column) then that's a bonus that 
adds to your final score.

    You can pull crates both horizontally or vertically, but not diagonally.
If you point at an intersectoin of matching crates then both axis will be pulled.
Gaps will be immediately filled in by any crates from above and empty aisles will
be filled in from the the left. You can also use the compactor function to create
new horizontal matches.


     When you've moved all that you can, then go to the game menu to get your paycheck.
If you clear the enitire warehouse the boss will even give you some words of encouragement.

    TIPS:

  • avoid creating a square of four matching blocks. You'll be forced to leave one of them.
  • Look for moves ahead where you can form T, +, and L patterns .
  • The Magic shuffle technique is not very reliable, but it can be useful for creating new matches
    when your in the 70-90% range. You may have to use it a few times to get good results. This feature is really a gamble. You'll have to balance the potential gain with the the loss of respect incurred.

    • h3>Score and Respect value adjustments between difficulty settings 
    for x number of tiles removed at a time. 
#pulled  - #bitmaps -     value   ~ respect    
2                  3              1500     -15          
2                  6              3000     -30            
3                  3              1800       0            
3                  6              3600       0               
4                  3              2100      +15         
4                  6              4200      +30         
5                  3              2400      +30         
5                  6              4800      +60          

respect penalty for each  action between difficulty settings 
UNDO        3       ->      -800 starting value = 3000       
UNDO        6       ->      -200 starting value  = 6000 
Magic Shuffle        ->     -400 points each (applies universally).

    CONFIG FILE:

    the whconfig.dat file contains a sequence of control values;
  • The horizontal number of crates. Should be between 5 and 20
  • the vertical number of crates . Should match the horizontal value
  • the default number of tiles. Must be between 3 and 6
  • the name of the opening tile theme set folder; i.e. "\\ts_default".
    • example; {17,17,5,"\\ts_default"}

    TILESET THEMES

         Under "Tile Options" there is now a selection to choose differnt tileset themes. 
Each theme is contained in a subfolder of the main program directory, and must 
start with "ts_" in order to be listed in the game. The game comes with several theme
folders already. To create a theme set you need to draw seven 8-bit windows Bitmaps.
Each bitmap must be 45 pixels wide by 36 pixels long. Tile #7 is always the 'empty space'.

    Misc. Features

  • when the Demo checkbox is checked the game plays itself.
    A small popup window will display the targeting info.
  • On payout the game statistics are saved in the whstats.dat file

  • Credits

    Warehouser was written in the Euphoria programming language interpreter, using the Win32lib library
    Win32lib ; Windows API support library originally developed by David Cuny,
    updated by Matthew Lewis, Derek Parnell , & many others

    .